Washington Post on new media

From: Apple - profiles - washington post

Video: apple_pro-washington_post_720x416.mov (video/quicktime Object)

Today's theme is snarky-ness. I'm blogging this just for reference. I despise it but it is interesting. So let's kick the tires.

It's a slickly edited piece from apple. It has no authenticity. It's only interesting because it give a fakey insight into the Washington Post's video journalism group. They have 50 people on staff roaming with camera's... that's interesting. But it's low on real information and insight.

I'm sure the people involved are very interesting people but apple does a nice job of making them seem like passionless boring people without original ideas... because heh, it's not about the people, it's about selling Final Cut and apple computers, and if the people are boring it makes the technology look more interesting.

"I like it when the technology just goes away and you can focus on the aesthetic." Are we on message? Yack. Fluff. Apple needs to rethink their marketing strategy. But then Apple boycott's the blogging world, and doesn't get authentic and real people. Rather ironic.

The most interesting point was what Jim brady, the Exec VP, called "appointment viewing". Apparently "appointment viewing" is the misguided idea that people will come back once a week to re-visit a story to see a new five minute video clip.

Here the opportunities for internet based distibution for media are wide open and Jim is taking the worst thing about television, that it's not space or time shiftable and recreating it on the internet in a vain homage to obsolescence. The only thing he's missing is to make their video pieces disappear after being online for an hour, which is why there content isn't a complete failure because shows stick around long enough that enough people stumble on them. And stumble is the word.

Here's a hint washington post. Throw out the interactive flash storytelling crap put the story in a nicely packaged downloadable video format like MP4 and throw it in a good subscribeable RSS/Media RSS feed with some permalinks to some supporting web page based information. It's called "subscribership"... and you should know what that is because you've been delivering newspapers to people's doors for a century. So why do you make people work so hard to follow up on stories online? Why don't you just work on a virtual baseball bat that can beat them over the head. You're version of delivery is akin to leaving the newspaper laying half way to the front porch in a puddle in the rain.

I don't know why mainstream press people are so resistant to getting a clue. I guess they've just started grasped the web1.0 idea of the "web page" and can't see anything beyond it. They think they have... but they haven't realized "flying type" is not real interactivity. RSS, metadata, microformats... beyond the web page... beyond the desktop even. Clue into it.

Tags: brand interactive-brand nprness washingtonpostness storytelling video-editing tom-kennedy apple final-cut washington-post laptop-editing video-on-the-net distribution jen-crandall journalism creative-class rob-curley appointment-viewing=bs